Part 6

The merciless years changed the fortunes of the place, and it was now in an atmosphere of decay. It was a gray unpainted two story affair, with a wooden awning over a broad platform in front, along the outer edge of which hung a small squeaky sign:

+-------------------+ | TIPTON POSEY | |GENERAL MERCHANDISE| +-------------------+

It was the general loafing place of the old muskrat trappers and pot hunters—known as “river rats,”—and old settlers, whose principal asset was spare time, but everybody for miles around came occasionally to “keep track o’ what’s goin’ on,” and to exchange the gossip of the river country.

Posey, the jovial and philosophic proprietor, who lived upstairs, was a sympathetic member of the motley gatherings. He was utilized in countless ways. He acted as stakeholder and referee when bets were made on disputed matters of fact, delivered verbal messages, and always had the latest news. He was a good natured, ruddy faced old fellow, with an eccentric moustache that curled in at one corner of his mouth, and seemed to be trying to make its escape on the other side. He seldom wore a hat and his gray hair stood up like a flare over his high forehead.

The confused stock of goods included a little of everything that any reasonable human being would want to buy, and lots of things that nobody could ever have any sane use for. Those who were unreasonable could always get what they wanted by waiting a week or two, for “Tip” declared that he would draw upon the resources of the civilized world through the mails, if necessary, to accommodate his customers.

Posey was reliable in everything except regular attendance. He “opened store” spasmodically in the morning, and closed it “whenever they was nobody ’round” at night. When his life-long friend, Bill Stiles, was unavailable as a substitute guardian he often locked up and left a notice on the door indicating when he would return. I once found one reading: “Gone off—back Monday.” It was Wednesday and it had been there since Saturday. Various lead pencil comments had been inscribed on the misleading notice by facetious visitors, among them “Liar!” “What Monday?” “Sober up!” “Stranger called to buy a hundred dollars’ worth of goods and found nobody home.” “The sheriff has been here looking for you twice,” and several other notations calculated to annoy the delinquent. Sometimes the notice would simply read “Gone off,” which, in connection with the fact that the door was locked, was convincing to the most obtuse observer. Tip usually found a fringe of patient customers and assorted loiterers sitting along the edge of the platform, discussing the burning questions of the day, when he returned.

During the shooting seasons he spent much time on the marsh down the river. Orders were stuck under the door, and during his brief and uncertain visits to the store, he filled them and left the goods in a locked wooden box in the rear, to which a few favored customers had duplicate keys.

While Tip’s affairs were not conducted on strictly commercial principles, he had no competition, and eventually did all the business there was to be done. “I git all the money they got, an’ nobody c’d do more’n that if they was here all the time,” he remarked, as he laid his gun and a bunch of bloody ducks on the platform and unlocked the door late one night, after several days’ absence. “I got ’em all trained now an’ they’d be spoiled if I took to bein’ here reg’lar.”

There were two “spare rooms” over the store, that were reached by a stairway on the outside of the building. I usually occupied one of them whenever I visited that part of the river. Bill Stiles slept in the other when he thought it was too dark for him to go home, or he was not in a condition to make the attempt. It was in use most of the time.

Bill was the _genius loci_, and gave it a rich and mellow character, which it would have been difficult for Posey to sustain alone. He was a grizzled veteran of the marshes. For many years he had lived in a tumble-down shack on “Huckleberry Island.” He trapped muskrats and mink over a wide area in the winter, and shot ducks and geese for the market in the spring and fall. When the fur harvests began to fail, and the game laws became oppressive, he concluded that he was getting too old to work, and was too much alone in the world. He moved up the river and built a new shack on “Watermelon Bend,” which was within easy walking distance from the store, where he could usually find plenty of congenial company when he wanted it. Here he had become a fixture.

Out of the ample fund of his experience, flavored and garnished by the rich and inexhaustible fertility of an imagination, that at times was almost uncanny, had come tales of early life on the river and marshes that had enthralled the loiterers at the store. They shared the shade of the awning with him during the hot summer days, and surrounded the big bellied wood stove in the dingy interior during the winter days and evenings when “they was nothin’ doin’” anywhere else in the region, and listened with rapt interest to his reminiscences. Any expression of incredulity met with crushing rebuke. “I didn’t notice that you was there at the time,” he would remark with asperity. “If you wasn’t, that’ll be all from you.”

The muskrat colonies still left along the river, and out on the marshy areas, were often drawn upon by adventurous youngsters, solely for the purpose of “seein’ Bill skin ’em.” Clusters of the unfortunates were brought by their tails and laid on the store platform. The old man would look the crowd over patronizingly, take his “ripper” from his pocket, and, with a few dexterous strokes, perform feats of pelt surgery that made the tyros gasp with admiration.

“I skun six hundred an’ forty-eight rats once’t, in five hours, that I’d caught on Muckshaw Lake the night before,” was Bill’s invariable remark after he had finished his grewsome performance.

The adulation of these small audiences was the glow that illumined his declining days.

When I first met the old man years ago, he was engaged in writing his autobiography, and at last accounts he was still at it. His shack and the little room over the store had gradually become literary temples. His complicated manuscripts and notes were kept in an old black satchel of once shiny oil cloth, that he called his “war bag.” On its side was the roughly lettered inscription: “HISTORIC CRONICELS—STILES.” He carried it back and forth between his abodes with much solicitude. During the many evenings I spent with him, he would frequently extract its contents and read aloud in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. He often paused and looked over the rims of his spectacles, with animation in his gray eyes, when he came to passages that he deemed of special importance. The masses of foolscap contained records that were only intelligible to the writer. His grammar and spelling were hopelessly bad, his methods of compilation were baffling, and his penmanship was mystic, but his collection of facts and near-facts was prodigious. He took long reflective rests between the periods of active composition. They were deathless chronicles in the sense that they seemed to be without end, and they appeared to become more and more deathless as he proceeded.

The first two or three hundred pages were what Bill called a “Backfire Chapter.” It began with the Creative Dawn, and was a general historical résumé down to the time of his appearance on earth. It skipped lightly over the great events, that loom like mountain peaks in the world’s history and tower away into the receding centuries. When he came to the Deluge he got lost among Noah’s animals for awhile and floundered hopelessly for adjectives. It was impossible to enumerate and describe all of them, but he did the best he could. Through a maze of wars and falling empires, he got Columbus to America. The Republic was established, and civilization finally flowered with the birth of Bill Stiles, A.D., 1836. From the dawn of time to the rocking of Bill’s cradle was a far cry, but his annals included what he considered the essential features of that dark period.

In addition to a vast amount of matter of purely personal interest, the work was designed to accurately record the happenings in the river country during Bill’s lifetime.

Much of his material was collected at the store. The year that Bundy’s Bridge was built, and the ferry ceased operations, was shrouded in historic gloom. Five times the year had been changed in the chronicles, for five eminent authorities differed as to the date, and each of them had at one time or another succeeded in impressing Bill. He seemed confident of all his other facts. The other bridges had given him no trouble.

There was no question in his mind as to when the Pottowattomies were relieved of their lands and forcibly removed from the country, or when the camp of horse thieves on Grape Island was broken up.

There was a tale of another band of horse thieves, whose secret retreat was on an island in the middle of a big lake of soft muck several miles south of the river.

The one route of access to it was a concealed sand bar known only to the outlaws. The unsavory crew collected their plunder on the island, where the pilfered beasts were cared for, and their markings changed with various dyes. In due time they smuggled them away in the darkness to distant markets. They once captured a too curious preacher, who was looking for his horse, and kept him in durance vile for several months. The expounder of the gospels labored so faithfully in that seemingly hopeless vineyard that the blasé bandits were finally “purified by the word of the Lord, gave up their dark practices, made restitution, and ever after lived model lives.”

There was a record of a mighty flood that drowned out everything and everybody, ran over the top of the bridge and carried part of it away, and following this were notations of approximate dates of sundry happenings—when the gang of counterfeiters that dwelt in Pinkamink Marsh were caught and “sent up”—the year that Bill killed a blue goose on “Boiler Slough”—when the tornado blew all of the water out of the river at “Ox Bow Bend” and left the channel bare for half an hour, and the year that “forty-six thousand rat skins was took off Shelby Marsh.”

A page was devoted to a reign of terror that lasted several weeks in 1877. For five nights an awful roar had come out of “Bull Snake Bayou.” The mystery was never explained, but Bill thought that the noise had been produced by a “whiffmatick” or a “hodad” that had come down with the spring flood, lost its way, and was shedding horns or scales in the vine-clad thickets.

The births, weddings and deaths of all the old settlers were carefully recorded, and many of their exploits detailed at length. There was an account of the capture of Hank Butts and his illicit still by the revenue officers, the failure of the jury to convict, owing to the reputations of the culprit’s two sons as dead shots, and the story of Hank’s death in a feather bed, with his boots on, when he went to visit a city relative and blew out the gas a few months later.

Bill’s experience with a “cattymount” was related with much detail. He had encountered it in the woods when he was young, and had spent two days and nights in a tree, living on crackers, plug tobacco, and a bottle of sage tea that he fortunately happened to have with him. The animal’s foot had been shattered by Bill’s only bullet and this prevented it from going into the foliage after him. The captive had chewed up over a pound of the plug and had carefully aimed the resulting juices at the baleful eye-balls that gleamed below him at night, hoping to blind his besieger. When the supply of this ammunition was exhausted the animal’s eyes were still bright, although Bill had scored many body hits and had decidedly changed the general color of his enemy.

Hunger finally compelled the savage beast to beat a retreat and the situation was relieved. The “cattymount” had evidently increased in size with the succeeding years, for in the manuscript its estimated length had been twice corrected with a pen, the last figures being the highest. Bill added that he had killed this “fierce an’ formidable animal” later, and that “its skin was taken east.”

Somewhere among the confused piles was the tale of the last voyage of the little stern-wheel steamer, “Morning Star” to the ferry, under command of “Cap’n Sink.” She had come up from the Illinois river, and the falling waters had left her stranded for a week on a sand bar. Her doughty commander paced the deck and blistered it with profanity. He swore by nine gods that he never again would go above “Corkscrew Bend,” that was so crooked that even the fish had sense enough to keep out of it. His vociferous impiety filtered intermittently through the green foliage that overhung the river, and desecrated the shadow-flecked aisles of the forest, until the Morning Star’s sister boat, the “Damfino,” came wheezing up stream. The unfortunate craft was pulled off the bar and navigation officially ended.

Reliable data was becoming scarce. Bill’s recollections were getting hazy. The old settlers, whose memories could be relied upon, were dying off, and the mists were absorbing his ascertainable facts, but, while life lasts the chronicles will go on, for Bill’s genius is not of the sort that admits defeat.

There is much human history that might with profit be entombed in these humble archives, and its obscurity would be a blessing to those who made it. As the world grows older it finds less to respect in the dusty tomes that are filled with the story of human folly, selfishness and needless bloodshed.

Bill and I were enjoying a quiet smoke on the store platform one July afternoon, and discussing his historical labors.

“We’r livin’ in ter’ble times, an’ the things that’s happenin’ now mops ev’ry thing else offen the map,” he declared, as he refilled his cob pipe. “I see things in my paper ev’ry week that oughta be noted down in my history, but I’m pretty near eighty, an’ if I try to put ’em all in I’ll never git through. There’s too damn much goin’ on. They’r ditchin’ the river an’ hell’s to pay up above. They’r blastin’ in the woods with dinnymite, an’ some o’ them ol’ codgers that lives in them shacks up above English Lake’ll be blown to kingdom come if they don’t watch out an’ duck. They better wake up an’ come down stream. Say, d’ye see that damn cuss comin’ over the bridge? That’s Rat Hyatt, an’ I’m goin’ to jump ’im when ’e gits ’ere. He lost my dog I let ’im take. That feller’s no good, an’ ’e’s ripenin’ fer damnation.”

“Muskrat Hyatt” was a tall, raw-boned, keen-eyed ne’er-do-well sort of a fellow, who had hunted and trapped on the river for many years. He lived in an old house boat that had floated down stream during high water one spring, and got wedged in among some big trees in the woods, about half a mile above the bridge. He moved into it when the waters subsided and found it an agreeable abode.

“I hope the owner never shows up,” remarked Rat, after I knew him. “I don’t think I’d like him. If the water ever gits that high ag’in an’ floats me off, I’m willin’ to go most anywheres in the old ark so long’s she don’t take a notion to go down an’ roost on the bridge with me.”

He greeted us, with rather an embarrassed air, as he came up, and the old man spent considerable time in attempting to extract some definite information about “Spot.” Rat was evasive and unsatisfactory.

“They ain’t no more patheticker sight than to see some feller that sets an’ flaps ’is ears, an’ can’t answer nothin’ that’s asked ’im without tryin’ to chin about sump’n else all the time,” declared Bill. “I don’t care nothin’ about its bein’ hot. I want to know where in hell my dog is.”

“That dog o’ your’n’s all right,” said Hyatt. “I reckon ’e’s off some’rs chas’n rabbits, an’ you needn’t do no worryin’. If anybody’s stole ’im you bet I’ll git ’im an’ the scalp o’ the feller with ’im. If ’e aint ’ere tomorrer I’ll take a look around. A dog like that can’t be kep’ hid long, an’ somebody’ll ’ave seen ’im. He ain’t no fool, an’ if ’e’s shut up anywheres, you bet ’e’ll come back w’en ’e gits out.”

“Well, you see that ’e gits out,” replied the old man with asperity. “I’m done havin’ heart disease ev’ry time I don’t see that dog w’en I go by your place, an’ I want ’im back where ’e b’longs. I didn’t give ’im to you, an’ if you don’t know where ’e is you aint fit to have charge o’ no animal. This aint no small talk that I’m doin’. Its the summin’ up o’ the court.”

Spot was a well trained bird dog. Hyatt had borrowed him from the old man about two years before, and, as his facilities for taking care of him were much better than Bill was able to provide, the animal was allowed to remain at Hyatt’s house boat on indefinite leave. He slept under the rude bed and seemed much happier there than at home.

Hyatt was now in rather a delicate position. The dog had not been seen in the neighborhood for over a week. An old trapper had come down the river in a canoe and stopped for an hour or so at the house boat. He announced his intention of leaving the country forever, and was on his way to the Illinois where he hoped to find enough muskrats to occupy his remaining days. He wanted a good quail dog, and, after much jockeying, had acquired Spot in exchange for a repeating rifle and a box of cartridges. The dog was tied in the front end of the canoe and departed with his new owner. Hyatt had an abiding faith that Spot would return in a few days, and that the stranger would be too far away down stream to want to buffet the strong current to get him back.

The dog’s homing instinct had proved reliable heretofore, as he had been sold several times under similar conditions, and was now regarded as a possible source of steady income by his thrifty guardian.

Hyatt was careful not to sell the animal to anybody who was liable to be in that part of the country again. Spot had once gone as far as the Mississippi river with a confiding purchaser, and was away only a little over two weeks. He was now expected back at any time, in fact he was under the bed when Hyatt arrived home after the disagreeable reproaches of Bill Stiles, and the next day the incident was considered closed by both parties.

The only pet that Bill had cared anything for in recent years, besides his dog, was a one legged duck that he called “Esther.” The missing support had been acquired by a snapping turtle in the river, and Bill’s sympathies and affections had been aroused. During her owner’s absence from his shack, Esther and her brown brood were confined in the hollow base of a big tree, protected from the weasels and skunks by a wire screen over the opening.

By Saturday night Hyatt and Stiles had become quite chummy again. It was very hot and we sat in front of the store with our coats off. Bill was discoursing sapiently on topics of international import, when we saw somebody down the road.

“That ol’ mudturkle comin’ yonder with that pipe stuck in all them whiskers, is Bill Wirrick,” he announced after further observation. “We call ’im ‘Puckerbrush Bill,’ on account of ’is bein’ up in Puckerbrush Bayou one night in ’is push boat, an’ tryin’ to make a short cut to git back to the river. He got ’is whiskers tangled in the puckerbrush an’ had to cut away a lot of ’em with ’is knife to git out. He’s between some pretty big bunches of ’em now, but they aint nothin’ to what they was. He had pretty near half a bushel an’ ’e used to carry ’is money in ’em. I s’pose ’e’ll begin tellin’ about all ’is troubles w’en ’e gits ’ere. That’s what’s the matter with this place, an’ it makes me tired to hear all these fellers tellin’ their troubles w’en they oughta be listenin’ to mine. My troubles has got some importance, but theirs don’t interest nobody.

“Hello, Puck,” greeted the old man, as Wirrick came up, “how’s things down to the slough?”

“Pretty slow; got’ny tobacco?”

“Listen at ’im!” whispered Bill.

He was duly supplied, and took one of the hickory chairs under the awning. Notwithstanding their reported depletion, his whiskers were still impressive, and the warm evening breeze played softly and fondly among the ample remnants. His mouth was concealed somewhere in the maze. His pointed nose and watchful furtive eyes gave his face a peculiar foxy expression.

“Its a good thing you didn’t strike a prairie fire with them whiskers, instid of a mess o’ puckerbrush,” remarked Bill, after a period of silence.

“I’m goin’ to mow ’em in a few days to cool off, an’ then raise a new crop fer next winter. They’s lots more whar them come from,” replied Wirrick. “I’ll git some whiskers that’ll make you fellers set up an’ take notice ’fore the snow flies.”

The mention of fire in connection with his whiskers must have suggested something to Wirrick, for, when he appeared without them the following week, he said that he hated a razor, couldn’t find any shears, and had “frizzled ’em off with a candle.”

Bill was shocked at his appearance.

“You look like you was half naked. I see now w’y you been keepin’ that ol’ mug o’ your’n covered up. You’ve got a bum face. You git busy an’ git all the whiskers you can right away!”

The next arrival was Swan Peterson, an aged Swede, who lived in a dilapidated shack, festooned on the inside with rusty muskrat traps, near the mouth of “Crooked Creek.” His liver had rebelled against many years of unfair treatment, and his visage was of a greenish yellow. A prodigious white moustache, that suggested a chrysanthemum in full bloom, accentuated the evidence of his ailment. He was considerably over six feet tall. The years of hardship and isolation had bent his mighty shoulders and saddened his gray eyes. Peterson was cast in a heroic mould. His ancestors were the sea wolves who roved over perilous and unknown waters, and met violent deaths, in years when the Norse legends were in the making, but their wild forays and stormy lives meant nothing to him. He had no interest in the past or traditions to uphold. All he now wanted in the world was plenty of patent medicine and whiskey to mix with it, and in a pinch, he could get along without the medicine.

The jaundiced Viking came slowly up on to the platform, looked us over languidly, and commented on the general cussedness of the weather and life’s monotonies.

“I ban har fifty years, an’ I seen the same damn thing ev’ry year all over again. It ban cold in winter an’ hot in summer. I eat an’ sleep, an’ eat an’ sleep some more, an’ work hard all day, an’ then eat an’ sleep—ev’ry day the same damn thing. I ban takin’ medicine now five years, an’ I can’t git none that’s got any kick. Mebbe I got some o’ them things that Rass Wattles says Wahoo Bitters’ll cure, but mebbe I got something else that they didn’t know about when they mixed that stuff. I find mixin’ half Wahoo an’ half whiskey ban some help, but I’m goin’ to try some other bitters an’ mix in more whiskey. That whiskey ban a good thing, an’ when I get a good thing I put a sinker on it.”

Old “Doc” Dust drove up in a squeaky buggy with an ancient top. His lazy gray mare seemed glad to get her feet into the hollowed ground in front of the hitching rail.